Summer reading: on, connecting, becoming-with and being-in nature
This summer I have had the enormous good fortune to spend two weeks in France. The first of these was spent cycling east to west out of the arid lands of Provence and into the massif central and the Tarn valley. Much of this land is relatively wild and unpopulated; wild flowers flourished in the verges, trees and scrubby shrubs cover the uplands (even in the co-presence of a few sheep, which suggests that sheep farming doesn’t always need to mean the barren hillsides we take for granted in the UK) and the waters of the Tarn, which flow directly off the plateaus are crystal clear up to a depth of over a metre, something I’ve never seen here, and the river is designate for clean bathing. Cycling is my preferred way to be in a landscape; your experience its changes directly in your body, but at a pace which also enables you to experience in one day what it means to change altitude, or catchment. (There is also some top quality cycling infrastructure here too). The second week was spent with my partner’s family, supporting them to begin the task of emptying the home that his French great-grandparents retired to in the 1960s.
Being in France gave me plenty of time to read, but also the opportunity to connect with the issues that are on the ecological agenda in France. Browsing book shops and the features section of Le Monde highlighted that nature connection is a big current trend, but also a growing concern about the relationship with big tech. (Farmer, agroecologist and spiritual elder Pierre Rabhi — a sort of French Satish Kumar — has just published a book about Artificial Intelligence, for example). There is growing academic and political interest in the rights of non-humans. The slow pace of action on climate in France was also a big topic in the light of the IPCC report, despite a Covid recovery package that was significantly ‘greener’ than ours. Noticeable changes from the 2020 circular economy law are also starting to trickle through, as is the finance through polluter-pays mechanisms: cigarette manufacturers will now pay 80 million euros each year to fund the clear up of the 23 billion butts discarded every year. And I learned about a heartening youth-led arts and ecology movement in Tunisia (where I lived for a year) that would never have reached me in via the anglophone media.
Meanwhile, I read all or parts of three surprisingly related books:
1. Donna Harraway’s Staying with the Trouble (2016) (too much to do justice to here — but seemed to crop up everywhere, for example in column in Le Monde on living with Paris’s ‘liminal animals’ — pigeons, rats, rabbits).
2. Maurice Maeterlinck La vie des fourmis (The Life of Ants) (1930) — a surprising bookshelf find (in first edition, suggesting it had been sitting there for a long time) from an author I knew only as a playwright, highlighting the altruistic and communal behaviour of ants as a challenge to dominant theories of competition rather than cooperation in nature.
3. Relions-nous! La constitution des liens l’an 1 (Let’s connect! Towards a new constitution of connection)(collective, 2021) — a collective work, just published following a conference in May, and setting out a series of proposition to move society from the era of individualism to a “society of relations” based on principles of inter-dependence rather than dominance and human separatism, and covering topics including farming, art, law, economics, democracy etc.
Book 3 is particularly interesting because it posits itself as a sort of experiment: a provocation designed to provoke debate. And all three spoke in different ways to our urgent need to rethink what it means to be human at this time of crisis.
Since the book is unlikely to become available in English I have written a subjective list of the ideas I thought were the most interesting (broadly in order of appearance in the book). Lots of the authors call for forms of citizen assembly so I have not included this idea below — although it clearly reflects a collapse in confidence in representative democracy (including, for example, citizens’ juries for planning applications).
1. A tax on nitrogen-based fertiliser to finance a transition to sustainable agriculture
2. Storage locations in every city to support the reuse of building materials
3. Site-specific architectural training, focused on supporting architects to understand their role as place-makers in a bioregion (not designers of buildings or structures)
4. Replacing the idea of biodiversity off-setting with a principle of overall ecological gain from any development
5. A basic income for artists
6. Regional climate action plans, linked to year-by-year targets and accountability
7. Replacing the Ministry of Finance with a Ministry for Transition Finance, delivering an annual well-being budget.
8. A High Council for Long-Term Thinking (in fact, this to be the primary role of a second chamber)
9. Introducing legal personhood for ecosystems into French law and replacing the definition of sustainability and requirement not to ‘compromise the needs of future generations’ with a requirement to ‘serve the needs of future human and non-human generations’.
10. Taking water utilities into common ownership.
11. Redrawing administrative boundaries around catchments (each with another citizens’ assembly…)
12. Penfriends who can only be contacted by letter for all school students
13. An international day of technology-free ‘flânerie’ (non-directional wandering about)
14. School children to all have roles as mentors and tutors for younger children (and for teamwork to replace individual competitive activities).
15. All school children to be involved in decision-making around the canteen, energy use and buildings management.
16. A lifelong school portfolio of nature-based work for school children.
17. Total restructuring of the History curriculum with an emphasis on understanding the origins of contemporary conflicts and how historic conflicts have been resolved.
18. A requirement on big media companies to use profits to subsidise smaller independent community media.
19. Collective attention to be treated as a matter of public policy, like public health.
20. Three trees per resident for every urban area.
21. Each resident to have a formal duty of care towards at least one tree, or area of public green space.
22. Holistic community-centred wellbeing centres in every community.
23. Better training — and higher status — for early years’ workers.
24. State to create self-governing autonomous zones as experiments in collective organisation and resource management.
25. ‘Earth hubs’ in each city: where people can connect, form projects, co-work etc.
Finally, the book highlights one project where this work is already being done: Makan Fofana’s brilliant work to apply design thinking to deprived urban suburbs, to allow young people to reimagine their neighbourhoods and to imagine a possible future beyond escaping from where they have grown up. His essay highlights the absurdity that it’s easier to imagine a future on Mars, than in the neglected parts of our urban landscape. Makan Fofana is currently studying for a PhD at Queen Mary in London, but his ‘hypercube’ project (for which Fofana declared himself “Minister of Magic for the Suburbs”) [English short description] has already been featured in a wide range of forums and contexts (for example this UNESCO project). It reminded me of some of the work featured in the Imagination Infrastructuring event back in June, in particular Phoebe Tickell’s Moral Imaginations work and Andre Reid’s work in Walsall.
Albert Einstein’s remarks about life and cycling — that to keep your balance you must keep moving — are well-worn to the point of cliché now. But keeping moving, and pedalling, over the summer is certainly providing some of the balance I needed to keep thinking creatively.
